In this blog I will tell you about my development activities related to open source and other software. Occasionally I might give some hints on how to do something.

19 Feb 2009

Trying to use QEMU and GDB to debug GRUB 2

I made some modifications to GRUB 2 that seems to cause crashing somewhat early in boot process. So I wondered how to debug this. One obivious solution was to see what is happening on the system. So I planned to try out QEMU's GDB support.

First I was running QEMU from Ubuntu 7.10 to try it out, but it crashed the whole QEMU when my problemous code was executed so it wasn't so nice :). Next I went to get newest QEMU from their SVN, compiled it and tested it out. This newest version doesn't crash anymore so I continued my trek.

As there didn't seem to be any good front ends matching my requirements for this case I turned to last resort; gdb text console itself.

I have never liked the gdb text console interface so it took a bit time to remember (and google) how it works.